Chrissy Kolaya has been giving a few interviews lately about her new novel, Charmed Particles. In preparation for our own interview with her here on the Dzanc blog, we’re rounding up the most recent of them so you can see if she’s left anything out. If you have questions for Chrissy, please fill out the form at the bottom of this entry.

On Colleen M. Story’s “Writing and Wellness” website, Chrissy discusses how she balances writing with day-to-day life, offering a thoughtful meditation on letting novels go: “I think [the darkest moment] was realizing that the first novel I wrote was perhaps more of a learning experience than something that belonged out in the world, at least in its current state.… It was such a relief to hear from these mentors and other writers I crossed paths with that nearly all of them had entire book-length projects that now lived “under the bed,” so to speak—that is, that after a number of rejections along the way, they’d decided to put that project aside and begin work on something new. While it was difficult and heartbreaking to come to that decision about my first novel, it was also liberating to hear that it was okay to do so and to give myself permission to move on and write Charmed Particles.”

Over at Late Night Library, Chrissy ponders the revision process, including the role of her editor and her agent, Eleanor Jackson, who helped Chrissy to discover that “the real conflict existed within the characters and the way they responded to the things in their lives that were changing. In terms of pacing, my editor, Michelle Dotter, was great about helping with that. In early edits, she suggested moving around a few chapters so readers could get to that narrative tension a bit earlier than was happening in early drafts of the book. It feels to me like this was a book in which, with much assistance from my editor and agent, I finally learned how to make sensible decisions in terms of structure, to be attentive to it.”

In a self-interview at The Nervous Breakdown, pairs up her characters with famous fictional nemeses in some literary bar fights – and gives a beer pairing for her novel.

Questions for Chrissy? Fill out the form below – we won’t send you any emails and we won’t share your email address. (Questions may be edited for length.)